Publications

The Australia Matters for America/America Matters for Australia report is part of the Asia Matters for America initiative at the East-West Center in Washington. This edition was produced in partnership with the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney and the Perth USAsia Centre at the University of Western Australia. Read online

Debunking the common laissez-faire myth surrounding turn-of-the-century American foreign relations allows for a reconceptualisation of American imperialism from 1890 to 1913. The Republican Party, the party of protectionism, found itself riven by internal disagreements over the future of the protectionist system and US imperial expansion. From within Republican protectionist ranks arose a progressive wing that increasingly looked beyond the home market for the country’s growing American agricultural and manufacturing surpluses. They did so against staunch anti-imperial opposition not only from American free-trade independents, but also from the Republican Party’s isolationist home-market protectionists, who yet feared or disdained foreign markets and colonial acquisitions. These progressive Republican proponents of empire combined coercive trade reciprocity with protectionism—an expansive closed door—and worked hard to extend American imperial power through informal means of high tariff walls, closed US-controlled markets, and retaliatory reciprocity if possible, by formal annexation and military interventionism when necessary. The American Empire thus arose owing to the imperialism of economic nationalism, not the imperialism of free trade. Read article

The World Press Institute Fellowship each year gives a group of mid-career journalists the chance to visit iconic, well-regarded and successful media outlets while immersing themselves in the American culture and way of life. In 2014, Shalailah Medhora, previously at SBS and now at The Guardian Australia, was one of nine journalists from around the world to undertake this inspiring program. Read the full report on her experience here. Read more

Humans, despite the country they inhabit, the social structures they constitute, and the forms of governments they live under, universally possess political attitudes; that is, those attitudes towards sexual norms, out-groups, resource allocation, cooperation and fairness. It has been proposed that this near universal manifestation across societies remains ingrained in the psychological architecture of humans because of human evolution. However, there is enormous variation in political attitudes within and across populations, and this variation is not merely a function of social differences but derives, in part, through neurobiological differences within human populations. Thus, there is great confusion on the difference between what has evolved as universal, and what is due to individual variation. This confusion, results, in part on the lack of integration of the theoretical mechanisms that addresses how humans vary within evolutionarily adaptive universals. Here we seek to fill this lacuna by explicating how evolutionary biology and psychology account for the universal need for humans to have political attitudes while neurobiological differences account for variation within those evolved structures. Link to publishers

A former senior mujahidin figure and an ex-counter-terrorism analyst cooperating to write a book on the history and legacy of Arab-Afghan fighters in Afghanistan is a remarkable and improbable undertaking. Yet this is what Mustafa Hamid, aka Abu Walid al-Masri, and Leah Farrall have achieved with the publication of their ground-breaking work. The result of thousands of hours of discussions over several years, The Arabs at War in Afghanistan offers significant new insights into the history of many of today’s militant Salafi groups and movements. By revealing the real origins of the Taliban and al-Qaeda and the jostling among the various jihadi groups, this account not only challenges conventional wisdom, but also raises uncomfortable questions as to how events from this important period have been so badly misconstrued. Link to publishers

A special edition of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art (Vol 14, Issue 1, 2014), edited by the US Studies Centre's Professor Roger Benjamin has been published. Entitled “American Art, Australian Focus, 1945-1975”, the edition emerges from a series of seminars and conferences supported by the US Studies Centre. Link to journal

Like the ideology undergirding Occupy Wall Street, Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century exhibits a marked lack of historical consciousness and complexity, writes lecturer Thomas Adams. In this essay, he argues that Piketty confuses capitalism with capitalist social relations, and thus imagines solutions without politics, lacks coherence regarding the necessity for a revaluation of labor and a shrinking of the moral confines of the market, and hopes for a better world sans class politics as a mechanism. Read article

US Studies Centre CEO Dr Bates Gill has contributed the chapter "Untapped Trilateralism: Common Economic and Security Interests of the European Union, the United States and China" to a new book exploring the economic, political, investment, and trade relations between China and the EU. China and the EU in Context: Insights for Business and Investors brings together the research of world-class commentators on China and is edited by Executive Director of the China Studies Centre and Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney Kerry Brown. Read more

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has put himself in an awkward position between Congress and the White House in a bid to influence American foreign policy towards Iran. Lecturer Malcolm Jorgensen looks at the move.